Facebook’s Top Cop: Joe Sullivan

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world after China and India , and Joe Sullivan would be head of Homeland Security. According to the analysis Facebook will reach up to 1 billion users within this summer.

His actual title is chief security officer. The “terrorists” he’s up against include the “Koobface gang,” a quintet of Russians who unleashed a worm that turned ­Facebookers’ computers into enslaved bots; the spammers who flooded the site with violent and pornographic images in December; scammers who trick Facebook users into clicking links and filling out surveys for the swindlers’ profit; pedophiles using the site to make contact with minors; and scrapers who inappropriately raid Facebook for users’ valuable personal information. These scoundrels include those who use malicious apps, hackers and an amateur porn purveyor who matches profile pages to private nudie photos submitted by vengeful exes—making it easy to contact, harass and “poke” the unwitting and involuntary porn stars.